Geospatial Intelligence Forum Interview

Click here to read the Q&A:INTELLIGENCE INTEGRATOR: Strategically Aligning the IC to the Nation's Highest Priorities.

Exerpt from the interview:Cardillo was interviewed by GIF Editor Harrison Donnelly.

Q: What is your mission as deputy director of national intelligence for intelligence integration?

A: The top-level description is pretty straightforward. The DNI created this position and asked me to stand up this office to deliver on his vision for the intelligence community. The touch-point, foundation and central idea that he brings to his job is integration. I am to create positions, mechanisms and governance processes to strategically align the IC against the nation’s highest priorities. That’s easy to say, but it gets more complicated after that.

There are a number of sub-components to that, which I’ll list in no particular order. I have the responsibility for the presidential daily briefing [PDB], so on any given day I can be the last person to edit it before it is finalized for the president. If it’s my morning to brief, I’m the first person to engage with him about what he thought of what we wrote the night before. That is really job one.

The second job I have is to be Director Clapper’s principal deputy on the National Security Staff [NSS]. The way the NSS runs is that there are principals’ committee meetings, where he is the principal, and many deputies committee [DC] meetings under that. When there is a DC meeting on Somalia, Yemen, North Korea, Iran or elsewhere, I’m always the invited participant, although I can delegate that function, since there are only so many hours in the day and there are some issues I don’t need to cover. That takes up a good chunk of my time, because three hour-and-a-half meetings in a given day add up. Read More...